Recently I was performing a wonderful rendition of the Prologue to Into the Woods to a rapt audience of no one, which is something I’m sure that we all do right?
Anyway, I got to the line of, “Into the Woods to get the thing, that makes it worth the journeying,” and that got me thinking about other conversations I have had with some friends and when I first heard of the term “a MacGuffin.”
In this conversation, my younger self had just nodded along and pretended to understand what that term meant. I mean, you can’t possibly let other snobs know that you don’t know something. So, from the use of context clues, I began to build an understanding of what that term meant and concluded that it was item or thing that drives the entire plot of a story. Or as the Sondheim musical so eloquently puts it, “the thing that makes it worth the journeying.”
Since then, I never really thought about it, but now I wonder: what is the story of this term? So now, after years of throwing this word around to impress my friends and colleagues, I think it’s time for me to educate myself — and by proxy, you, dear readers.
Looking back at the history of MacGuffins, the term was coined and attributed to either Alfred Hitchcock or Angus MacPhail, MacPhail being a screenwriter who worked with Hitchcock on numerous films. They would explain the idea by telling the following story:
Two Scottish men are riding on a train when one man asks the other about the contents of a package on the overhead luggage rack.
“It’s a MacGuffin,” says the first man, “a device for hunting lions in Scotland.”
“But there are no lions in Scotland,” replies the second man.
“Well then, it’s not a MacGuffin,” says the first.
Well, there you have it. MacGuffins are just devices used to hunt lions in Scottland; guess we can wrap up this blog now and go home.
Okay fine, that isn’t the point of the story itself, which ironically is the point (cue the Alanis Morissette song.) The lion trapping device was simply there to get you engaged into the story and this blog post.
If we were to investigate the interviews where Hitchcock would recount this story, he would further explain that MacGuffins are simply literary devices that are truly insignificant to the story and often are something that the audience doesn’t care about, but the characters on the screen worry about it.
That makes sense because if we look within the word, there is a “guff,” which is something that is considered trivial or worthless. So, if we were to go back to how in Into the Woods, the characters are all venturing into the woods to find something. We as an audience don’t really care about the cow as white as milk, the festival or any of the other wants of the characters. But the characters worry about it, and it causes them to venture into the woods, thus kicking off the story.
So, I was kind of right; the MacGuffin is a thing, but Encyclopedia Britannica further elaborates that, yes, this element of storytelling could be an object, but it could also be an event, an idea, or even another character. On top of that, the MacGuffin can even change as the story progresses, simply because it isn’t central to the story itself. This is something that can also be seen in Into the Woods, as when we start Act 2 and the Giant comes down to seek revenge for the death of her husband. This, in turn, causes everyone in the story to now be searching for Jack for their own personal gains, and through this, Jack has become the MacGuffin.
There are other famous uses of this literary device, from The Maltese Falcon where the characters are trying to find the titular item only to discover that it was a fake, to the “Heart of the Ocean” in Titanic, where the story was never about the jewel but rather the love story of how Jack saved Rose.
If you would like to start your own journey and need something to spur you on, feel free to check out some of the movies and books in this list I’ve created that feature some of my favorite MacGuffins, including The Silmarillion, a book where you learn some of the wild history of Middle-earth and how before everyone was obsessed with this one piece of jewelry, they were obsessed with three shiny rocks.
So, journey forth my fellow readers, film watchers, and other media consumers, and ultimately, I hope you find the thing that makes it worth the journeying.